almonds

“A land of promise, a land of memory, a land of promise flowing with the milk and honey of delicious memories!”
Alfred Tennyson

Rich Spiced Hot Chocolate might well be the simplest thing to enjoy this season. It’s simple things that matter, and with recipes like these, ingredients are of prime importance. You can’t go wrong if you use good quality ingredients. This Rich Spiced Hot Chocolate is just that. Indulgent too. Made with Premium Milk from Mother Dairy, single origin couverture chocolate, dark cocoa, vanilla beans and spices from South India, it’s hard to go wrong. The milk was the biggest surprise though!It’s the best milk I’ve ever had! Words of praise from a dairy lover at home, one who lives to enjoy a chilled good glass of milk. The genes are the same. I love everything dairy too, but I am always surprised by how advanced his taste-buds are. One sip of the newly introduced Premium Full Cream milk from Mother dairy swiftly knocked his current favourite from another brand right off. It’s so good that I don’t even need flavouring mama he exclaimed!This new variant from Mother dairy which has the highest FAT content of 7% along with 9% SNF is ideal for those looking for a rich milk diet and also for folk like us who enjoy making home-made sweets, ghee and curd. It offers 15% extra malai {cream} in comparison to full cream milk. For someone like me who makes clarified butter / ghee at home every weekend, this new variant is ideal. I increasingly use clarified butter or ghee in baking now, and as my preferred medium of fat in cooking now that winter is here. The greens use mustard oil, and almost everything else goes the ghee way! Tadka is always ghee, the ‘icing on the cake’!Think little ghee cakes, think shortbread with ghee, think stuffed radish and cauliflower parathas, and think dollops of melting homemade sweet butter on hot sarson ka saag! After all in India, Ghee is equivalent to love. Finger licking good stuff this! There is just so much you can do with this indulgent product. I can only imagine setting Greek yogurt at home now. Also simmering a rice pudding into creamy goodness, maybe a tapioca pudding or a chocolate oat pudding too.

With a traditional Indian households still enjoying the top of milk cream for so many reasons, the malai that the premium milk yields is impressive. Just 2 litres boiled, cooled and chilled overnight offered almost a cup of malai. This Dark Chocolate & Walnut Wholewheat Cakeisa nostalgic favourite with ‘top of the milk cream’ or ‘malai’. It brings back memories of the quintessential ‘malai’ or ‘top of the milk cream’ cakes from yesteryear. Decades ago, every Indian household use to boil milk, collect the top of the milk cream, use some as is and make sweet butter of the rest. The more adventurous ones used to bake a delicious homey comforting cake with ‘malai’.Then the mind wanders into more delicious spaces like a lighter panna cotta, maybe a Vietnamese coffee. The possibilities are endless as I grabbed the few remaining pouches from the kid who is happy to guzzle down his new favourite. To prove my point to him that the milk makes things oodles better, I quickly stirred him a Rich Spiced Hot Chocolate. With winter around the corner, this drink is a winner, a simple winner! It’s a great hit with kids and adults alike. In summer I’d do a chilled version in bottles which is equal fun and very addictive!Then to dive into the past, how can I not make my husbands childhood favourite, a Masala Kadhai Doodh. This is where dessert meets milk, a quintessential Indian favourite, a concoction you would find across North India. It’s simple, it’s bursting with goodness and flavour AND a big hit always. It’s quite similar to a thandai, infinitely customisable.Masala Kadhai Doodh is simply simmered with a powdered nut & spice mix in a large kadhai or wok for the flavours to steep and milk to thicken. Only with this high fat content milk, the time to thicken is substantially decreased. I used a mix of almonds, melon seeds, cardamom, nutmeg, a pinch of turmeric and saffron.We are a dairy loving home, and I set yougurt at home everyday. With quite a welcome high fat content, Mother Dairy’s Premium Milk yields far tastier home made yogurt, paneer, quark etc. It is also far easier to use in puddings, traditional kheers, halwas. With winter here a gajar ka halwa is calling my name. Simmered in this beautifully thick milk, I can only imagine how good the end result will be. What would be your favorite way to use this?

Place milk, star anise, cinnamon, vanilla bean and sugar in a heavy bottom pan and simmer for 15-20 minutes for flavours to steep.

Add the chocolate and cocoa powder, stir often to mix, and simmer gently until the chocolate melts.

Sieve and serve immediately, else steep for an hour, then reheat and sieve before serving.

Recipe Notes

Note: You can add a shot of Baileys irish Cream for an adult version. You can also add or remove spices as required. This also makes a nice chilled spiced chocolate milk. Stir well or sieve before serving.

Eggless Wholegrain Almond Jaggery Oat Cookies had us quite happy. These are cookies that comfort, hit the right spot, keeps you happy and are stuffed to the gills with good stuff. It’s actually a very simple cookie recipe, a twist on the fabulous Anzac, an eggless cookie I make often. A cookie I have recreated in different avatars often too.The concept is simple, and they are eggless cookies that keep for long and travel well. The same goes for the tart base that I make ever so often inspired by this eggless dough idea. Here’s one…These Eggless Mini Almond Oat Pies with Rabri Saffron Cream, a recipe for Diwali I did for KitchenAid, scream for attention.That they are eggless meets a growing local demand during the festive season around Diwali. Like Anzacs, these were delicious.“An Anzac biscuit is a sweet, hard tack biscuit, popular in Australia and New Zealand, made using rolled oats, flour, sugar, butter, golden syrup, baking soda, boiling water, and desiccated coconut. Anzac biscuits have long been associated with the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) established in World War I. It has been claimed the biscuits were sent by wives to soldiers abroad because the ingredients do not spoil easily and the biscuits kept well during naval transportation.”The Eggless Mini Almond Oat Pies were part wholegrain, yet with the goodness of oats and almond meal. These Eggless Wholegrain Almond Jaggery Oat Cookies bettered those! These are 100% wholegrain and the sugar has been replaced by jaggery. As you can see, I keep experimenting with this and that. Some work, some don’t, but it keeps me busy doing what I love best, baking!

With cookies as ridiculously simple as these, I found loads of time playing around styling and shooting them. Credit of course to the beautiful pottery I had on hand. The colours just resonated with my frame of mind, and that day all I did was have endless fun! Some days are so therapeutic; it was one of those!

The beautiful ceramic ware is from a local ceramic artist, Anumita Jain, from Delhi. You can find her at A Clay Story. I think you’ll see a lot more of her art in my frames in future as I mentioned in this Olive Oil Walnut Garlic Rosemary Foccacia post.Food props give me unbelievable happiness, the ‘earthy’, rustic and hand made ones making my heart sing with joy! Did I tell you I was back in Old Delhi yesterday? Yes, plan made suddenly and off the better half & me went. We wandered around, ate some, shopped some. More about that later. For now, here’s the simple Eggless Wholegrain Almond Jaggery Oat Cookies recipe!

“Don’t sit at home and wait for mango tree to bring mangoes to you wherever you are. It won’t happen.
If you are truly hungry for change, go out of your comfort zone and change the world.”
Israelmore Ayivor

Mango Almond Roulade with almond whipped cream. Light. Fresh. Delicious. Part wholegrain. To make it even better, filled with fresh mangoes swathed in beautifully whipped almond cream. Some things are just better with mango! So here’s another last minute mango based dessert to add to the last few mango desserts I shared, while we hang on to the end of the mango season. Just another clutch of days, maybe a week or so, and they’ll be gone.

However don’t panic if you can’t find some juicy mangoes. I’ve made this to great deliciousness with tinned peaches, fresh strawberries, a coffee whipped cream too {skip the almond maybe go with chopped walnuts}.

Mango Almond Roulade with almond whipped cream. Light. Fresh. Delicious. Part wholegrain. To make it even better, filled with fresh mangoes swathed in beautifully whipped almond cream. Some things are just better with mango!

Mango Almond Roulade with almond whipped cream. Light. Fresh. Delicious. Part wholegrain. To make it even better, filled with fresh mangoes swathed in beautifully whipped almond cream. Some things are just better with mango!

Place a parchment sheet on top, and roll with the towel lengthwise, and leave to cool completely. {The longer side will be the length of the roll}

Whipped Almond Cream

Place all ingredients in a large bowl. Whip with an electric hand blender on the highest speed until thick.

Assembling

Unroll the cooled cake, place on a sheet of parchment. Spread the almond cream filling over it with an offset spatula, leaving a little border right around to avoid the filling oozing out.

Sprinkle over with chopped mangoes.

Now with the help of the parchment paper, roll it right back into a roll, pulling the paper slightly to make a tight roll. Place seam down on cling wrap and chill for a couple of hours. Unwrap gently and lay seam side down on your serving platter.

Speaking at TEDx

Deeba Rajpal

Food stylist | Recipe developer | Food writer
Non-conformist, a 'rabid' baker cum food blogger from Gurgaon, for whom visual appeal holds as much significance as healthy & delicious food. An obsessed baker and cook, a 'locavore' by design, who enjoys getting food to the table with seasonal ingredients and local produce.
Give me an ingredient, offer me an idea, that's enough for the magic to begin. I love stirring a good curry too!